As computing technologies continue to expand to new regions throughout the World, technical innovators such as Web site designers and program developers face the ever-increasing task of having to localize content and program applications for different countries, regions, cultures, languages, user groups, and the many combinations thereof that describe a locale. Localization involves conforming an application, content, display information, and the like to appear to have been developed as a “local” product or service that conforms to the culture of a particular locale or region. For example, features such as language, date display format, time display format, money values and denominations, user identifications and naming formats, and the like are all details of localization that are considered when developing or conforming products and services for a particular locale.
Conventional applications are encoded, or otherwise developed and programmed, to incorporate one of many hard-coded localization options when the application is installed for use. For example, when a user first installs a new operating system, the installation process obtains locale information from the user, typically in the form of the user's language and country. Thereafter, the operating system will execute applications according to the designated language and country format. This type of localization conformance requires complex logic and lengthy code with extensive variations and exceptions to accommodate the many possible combinations of different countries, regions, cultures, languages, and user groups. As computing technologies continue to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult to encode and provide the many localization permutations needed to accommodate all of the possible locales and regions.